Woolf Works review, Royal Opera House: A layered, haunting ballet

In Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works, Virginia Woolf’s life and her subjects overlap, sharing the same space. It’s a layered, haunting ballet, with an elegiac central performance by Alessandra Ferri.

Created in 2015, this was McGregor’s first full-length work for The Royal Ballet. He’s always been drawn to conceptual and abstract dance, while this company has a strong narrative tradition: they’re natural dance actors, with a long history of story ballets. Here, they meet in the middle, with ideas and characters overlapping in the ballet’s own stream of consciousness. Max Richter’s atmospheric score gives the evening tension and melancholy.

With Uzma Hameed as dramaturge, the first act draws on Mrs Dalloway, with Ferri as both the older Clarissa Dalloway and as Woolf herself. The role was made for Ferri, a senior ballerina making a grand return to her first company; the performer brings her own echoes. On stage, she wanders among her memories.

Ferri is a commanding presence. Her feet have etched clarity as she tests out a step, and she brings a sharp quality of awareness to her dancing, both being and observing herself. As her past self, Yasmine Naghdi has a headlong sense of youth, matched by Francesca Hayward’s bright energy as Sally.

Memories of war cut across Clarissa’s life and loves. There’s a sense of compressed violence, almost-offstage shadows looming up behind the action, before we see those left behind. As the shellshocked Septimus, Calvin Richardson has a fragile delicacy, limbs soft as he tries to push himself forwards. Joseph Sissens is vivid as his comrade Evans, a memory who feels more real than the world around him.

The second act is an abrupt change of pace: a dance setpiece inspired by Orlando, all extreme poses and frenetic moves. Moritz Junge’s glittering costumes have Elizabethan shapes and glitzy gold fabric, while Lucy Carter’s lighting surrounds the show with lasers. It’s fast and furious but lacks the weight and shape of the rest of the ballet. Mayara Magri and Fumi Kaneko give distinctive, spiky performances.

The last act draws together Woolf’s own death with imagery from The Waves. We hear Gillian Anderson reading Woolf’s suicide note, as Ravi Deepres’s film shows a sequence of waves, hypnotically slowed. Ferri’s Woolf watches children dancing on the beach, or moves among a rippling corps de ballet of dancers. Her duet with William Bracewell is both tender and distant: she’s both in the heart of the action, and far away from it.

‘Woolf Works’ runs at the Royal Opera House, London, until 23 March; www.roh.org.uk